Despite other moments of disappointment, I still felt more connected to my new friends than I did to the other Davidson students, although I told only a few of them about Mom. I still had an impulse to pretend as though this life and the one that came before were disconnected, unrelated. I kept binge drinking, unable to resist the numb comfort that came with it, and somewhere along the way I started blacking out. The first time, sophomore year, shocked me. I pieced it together the next morning, my memories skittery and disconnected, representing only a fraction of what my friends told me about the night. I thought about my body walking around, my consciousness switching to autopilot. Talking to people I knew or didn’t, words escaping me and traveling out into the void, my memory for the last moment, the last hour, shut off. Memory not repressed, but never written.
That first blackout shook me, but when it happened again, it lost some of its force. I was a college kid; college kids blacked out. I’d spent so much time insisting to the cops that my memory was intact, it was a delicious relief to throw some of the hours of my existence to the oblivion they’d been so convinced lurked within me.
* * *
I didn’t go to Maine for the shorter holiday breaks—Thanksgiving, Easter, the long Presidents’ Day weekend. It wasn’t worth the quick trip, I thought, and anyway I was proud of the fact that I didn’t need to run home every chance I got, like the other students, who sometimes seemed like children to me. I went back north just once or twice a year. I’d stay in Peru and try not to think of that other town. But one day during a summer visit, I left the house and started driving, only half aware that I was headed toward Bridgton. I went the back way, slowly steering along bumpy camp roads that held tight to the lakeshores, before coming out on a long, straight road that led past the turnoff to Grammy’s house and the cemetery, then shot down a hill into the center of town.
As I turned at the light downtown, I felt strangely out of place as an adult driving a car. I could almost see my shadow self in the passenger seat where I belonged—chubby kid belly, long blond hair—looking over at me expectantly. We were headed back toward that house. I felt curiosity mixed with some sort of bravado, some need to stare things down. The times I would drive slowly past that house would come to outnumber the times I drove up to the cemetery where Mom’s pink-heart headstone sits.
As I drove down Route 93, I almost expected to see that police tape still cutting across my view, fluttering in the slight summer breeze. What I found was almost as sad: chain-link fence around the yard, dark fly screens falling off the windows, cheap children’s toys scattered on the lawn. The remaining spruce tree next to the door did nothing to block my view.
There were two cars in the driveway, so I rolled slowly by. I didn’t want to get caught, yet another curious stranger. I thought briefly about pulling over some distance away, maybe on the little connecting road across the street from the house, the one I’d given the 911 dispatcher as a landmark. But I knew that if I stopped, I wouldn’t be able to step out of the car. The moment my foot hit the road, darkness would snap down like a shade. A mist would envelop me, and 1994 would come roaring into my living present.
Safe behind the wheel, I turned around and went back up Route 93. The distance from my house to the intersection seemed pathetically short. As I turned left onto Route 302, I was careful not to look at the Venezia.
I passed Linda’s house, and just as I was wondering if she still lived there, I saw her walk out her front door in a bikini, holding a towel around her waist. I remembered how she used to tan on her lawn and even on her black-shingled roof.
Seeing Linda sent a shock through my body, a strange, bright thrill that made sweat break out in the crooks of my elbows. I kept driving, dimly registering more old landmarks: the big white house where my friend Vicki used to live. The cabins of Highland Lake Resort strung out along a break in the woods, with the water sparkling behind them. The town hall where I used to play basketball in the summer, the shack where I ice-skated in the winter visible just behind it. I turned left at the War Memorial and wound down the hill to the Big Apple, the gas station and convenience store that was the center of town gossip, where, a few hours after Mom died, dozens of people received news of the murder.
When I came to the Big Apple, I pulled into the parking lot to think; the electric feeling of seeing Linda was still running through me, and I had to figure out what it meant. I wanted to see her, to talk to her. Mom would want us to be in touch, I thought.
I took a deep breath, squeezed my fists around the wheel to force the shakiness from them. I dug some quarters out of the console. When I stepped out of the car and walked to the pay phone, I had to hold myself back from running. A phone book hung there from a steel chain; the pages were feathery under my fingers, and her number was easy to find. That sequence of digits was immediately familiar, lined up neatly with memory I didn’t realize was still within me. I pushed the coins in, but my heart started pounding; the blood was rushing through my head faster than I could think. What to say? What if seeing me would be too painful? The dial tone hummed in my skull. Finally I punched a button, and a clean, breathless silence began. I punched two or three more. I paused and held the heavy receiver to my ear. My shaking got worse, and I felt nauseated. I put the receiver back on its cradle. I kept my hand wrapped around it for a moment, holding on.
I didn’t call. It was the first time in my life that I’d been physically unable to go through with something for reasons I couldn’t explain.
I gave up, got back in the car. I drove over to the parking lot of the Highland Lake beach. The water shimmered in the late-afternoon light, sending up white explosions as skinny kids cannonballed off the docks. A few families sat on the sand, and some teenage boys perched in a cluster on a brick-red picnic table under the trees. I stayed in the car. I thought these people might recognize me, or they might not, and I wasn’t sure which would be worse. I lit a cigarette and smoked through my open window, watching those kids jump off the dock, over and over.
35
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